600 were treated here last year. but the problems they personify are symptomatic of a malaise far more general and serious than the poverty which affected most of the early immigrants on the lower East Side. If times were hard and prospects were dim for the parents then. there was always hope for the children. They became educated. grew up. left the poverty and the tenements behind. The immigrant version of the American dream fulfilled. Can it still happen here amidst the winos and junkies and garbage and the wreckage of abandoned buildings? It is often argued that it should be happening here. that the children of the new immigrants should grow up and surpass their parents as the old immigrants did. But todays conditions are not the same as yesterdays. The poverty is more hopeless. the dangers more acute.
Keywords matched
immigrant immigrants